


the sight that flashed before me was your face

by scorpiohs, stevesnosebump



Series: inspired by taylor swift [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (Briefly mentioned) - Freeform, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Fluff, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Reunions, Steve Rogers Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29160099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiohs/pseuds/scorpiohs, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stevesnosebump/pseuds/stevesnosebump
Summary: When Bucky falls, he crashes hard. He hits the ground and feels nothing but searing pain and the breath is knocked clean out of his body. The last thing he sees as he loses consciousness is Steve— it’s always him, always has been. It’s only right that he’ll die to the memory of Steve’s face. He maintains eye contact with the memory until it fades to black.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: inspired by taylor swift [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2072532
Comments: 6
Kudos: 51





	the sight that flashed before me was your face

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by "coney island" by taylor swift

When Bucky falls, he crashes hard. He hits the ground and feels nothing but searing pain and the breath is knocked clean out of his body. The last thing he sees as he loses consciousness is Steve— it’s always him, always has been. It’s only right that he’ll die to the memory of Steve’s face. He maintains eye contact with the memory until it fades to black.

As a stranger drags him through the snow, his delirious brain makes him think it’s Steve. He tries to smile, but can’t be sure if it actually shows on his face because he’s just too damn weak to move a muscle. He watches as the figure’s face shifts from the comforting blond to a wicked man he doesn’t know but understands he can’t trust. He looks to the side and sees a bleeding stump being dragged with him—when he realizes that the stump is what’s left of his arm, he can’t even find the strength to panic.

He watches helplessly as this man drags him, and the only thing he can find the strength to do is to mutter out a weak “Steve?” that the stranger doesn’t acknowledge. He isn’t thinking straight—that old familiar name is the only thing on Bucky’s tongue as he loses consciousness again.

* * *

Steve’s last thought before the ice is of Bucky. Of his face before the fall, desperate as he’d ever seen him. Scared. Bucky had never seemed truly scared before. Even at Azzano, he had put on a brave face.

Steve knows the act was all for him. Bucky always tried to be Steve’s protector, his guardian, even when Steve was grumpy about it. But Bucky had made it clear: “I know you can take care of yourself, but you can’t stop me from taking care of you, too, because— because if anything ever happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do.”

The words ring through Steve’s ears as the Valkyrie breaches the surface of the ocean and he surrenders to the cold all around him.

* * *

The name never fully leaves Bucky, even after all those years. He’s brainwashed and tortured enough to where he almost loses the name—he doesn’t remember it well enough to be able to say it, can’t even see it in his head, but he _knows_ it’s there, just out of reach. He knows it’s important to him, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t mention it to anyone, and he knows there’s nothing he can do to remember the name. He just keeps it tucked in his pocket where he can feel it every time he moves.

* * *

When Steve wakes up, his first thought is of Bucky. His cheeky grin, his messy hair, his bright eyes. But he quickly remembers that those are things of the past. Bucky is dead.

_And aren’t I, too?_

A baseball game comes through the static of the radio. 1941. A Dodgers game. He went to this game with Bucky. They spent the day eating hot dogs and laughing and wishing they could hold hands like all of the other young couples. When they got home, Bucky kissed him and told him that being with him, even in secret, was better than anything else, and he wouldn’t trade it for a million home runs.

Steve remembers not being able to wipe the smile off of his face.

But he’s not back home with Bucky. He’s somewhere else entirely. Alone.

* * *

Nothing has ever made the Winter Soldier feel as disoriented as New York. 

He’s walking through the streets of Brooklyn when it really hits him, that all too familiar feeling of something from his past trying to sneak back into the forefront of his life. He feels like he should _know_ the place, but why? Why does it feel so distantly familiar, a faded memory he can’t quite place? 

He scopes out his surroundings, a mixture of wanting to blend in with the crowd and simple hypervigilance from his intensive training. 

“How many tickets?” a stranger asks him, thrusting Bucky out of his mind and back into reality. Apparently, in his daze, Bucky had walked to some sort of amusement park and was now standing in front of a ticket booth attended by an impatient man.

“What?” 

“How many tickets? One? Or are you waiting on someone?” 

Bucky looks up at a sign that reads _“_ Coney Island.” The name produces a sinking feeling in his gut, that all too familiar pull of _“_ _I should know this”_ that tugs at him most days. He doesn’t know much, but he knows that this place means _something_ to him. 

“Uh… just one,” he mumbles, giving in to the part of him that wants to discover what those nagging flashes of his past mean. 

He walks around the park in a daze, bombarded by memories he can’t quite place. He watches the people who came with friends, or kids, or a partner, and feels an ache in his chest as his mind echoes, _“that should be us,”_ but who?

He sits down on a bench, tired of pacing around like some drugged up lunatic, and tries to chase the thought to find an answer—who is his heart trying to remind his brain of?

Screams from a large group of people make Bucky jump, alerting him to scan the crowd, a reminder from his training that pushes him into hypervigilance The disturbance had come from a large group of people riding a roller coaster _—The Cyclone,_ as he learns from the thrill-seekers trying to coax their friends into getting on the ride.

The name of that ride is familiar to him… Coney Island as a whole is familiar to him, too. The name he can’t quite place starts to stick out more, rattling in his brain as he touches the surface of a memory: Fireworks on a warm summer night, loud laughter and a tight embrace, golden hair and a shy smile.

“Wipe him,” are the chilling words he hears before the flash of the memory is stolen from him again. 

* * *

Steve has never felt more alone. Not when he was young and Bucky would go on all those dates and leave him home, before they confessed how they felt for each other. Not when he was on tour as Captain America, being dressed up like a doll and used as a prop. Not even after Bucky died and he had to go on fighting.

Nothing has ever felt like the deep ache that sits within him now. _A man out of time._

Brooklyn’s different. He wanders the streets and barely recognizes them. He finds his way to Coney Island, and sits down on a bench on the outskirts, watching the people go by. People who have no idea what this place used to look like, what it used to mean to him.

He tries to think about what Bucky would say to him if he were here. But if Bucky were here, Steve wouldn’t be feeling the way he does.

* * *

Bucky doesn’t chase an answer to the question of his past until he’s assigned a mission to kill Captain America. He doesn’t think anything of it (he’s not allowed to think, anyway, and the brainwashing keeps him complacent) until he’s thrown completely off-balance when the man stares at his unmasked face with a pained expression and says, “Bucky?”

“Who the hell is Bucky?” he sneers in response, but he can’t deny that the odd name flips a switch deep inside of him, makes him want to stop what he’s doing and forget the whole thing, forget HYDRA and find a place to stay until he understands who or what he is.

He thinks about that moment after the fight ends, trying to put together a puzzle he hasn’t collected all the pieces to yet. “Bucky” isn’t the name he’s had sitting on the tip of his tongue all these years, but he knows it’s important, too. He knows the man who had said the name is a piece of the puzzle, too— the biggest piece, at the centerfold of this unsolvable mystery— but he just can’t figure it out.

Pierce wipes his brain for the millionth time. It still isn’t enough to make him forget that something is wrong. Someone is missing. 

Bucky needs to figure out who that is. 

* * *

Bucky is alive. Bucky is _alive_.

But is he really?

The Winter Soldier has no idea who Steve is. He hadn’t responded to his real name. It’s been seventy years. What if he’s gone?

Steve decides that this is far worse than death. If Bucky had died all those years ago, he would have died himself. Knowing Steve, loving Steve, loving the men he fought with and the reason he fought in the first place.

Bucky now… Steve doesn’t wanna think about it.

He’s never really been able to squash the idealist in himself. He’s always been a dreamer. So he can’t shake the thought that Bucky is still in there, under years of torture and ice and separation.

Steve is gonna get through to him. He has to.

* * *

The mystery only becomes more muddled when Bucky nearly finishes his mission only to be knocked off-balance by the stranger once again when he tells him, “I’m with you ‘til the end of the line,” a phrase that Bucky knows he’s meant to be familiar with. The phrase flicks a switch in his brain again and has him saving the stranger rather than killing him.

He’s completely lost at that point—he doesn’t want to go back to Pierce and admit that he failed a mission. He wants to figure out who he is and why he felt compelled to save that man when he could have let him drown.

So Bucky does the only thing he can think to do.

He runs.

* * *

Steve wakes up with Bucky’s face at the front of his mind. His wide eyes, his trembling lip, the fear splashed across his face when he recognized Steve.

Or at least, Steve thinks that’s what happened. Why else would he be here, aching all over, but in a hospital bed, Sam at his side?

Bucky saved him. Steve was right; he’s still _Bucky_.

* * *

Bucky does what he can to jog his memory, starting with visiting the Smithsonian to learn everything he can about the man on the bridge.

To his surprise, he learns about himself, too.

He’s shocked when he sees a picture of a familiar face on the wall—his own face, he slowly realizes. James Buchanan Barnes, “Bucky.” That’s why the man on the bridge had said it to him.

Glimpses of tattered memories begin to fall into place as he reads about himself—his family, his athleticism, his time in the army. 

_Steve._ The second he sees that name, it slowly clicks in his mind. That’s the name that had been on the tip of his tongue for so long, that was the name he had come so close to calling out when he was sitting on that bench in Coney Island. Steve.

He visits the Smithsonian often, bringing a journal with him so he can write down the facts from the exhibit and whatever memories surface as he’s there. He enjoys reading about himself, and Steve, and the Howling Commandos, he likes feeling that flicker of a connection to his past, the life that was stolen from him by HYDRA. 

Bucky is at the museum again, reading his biography in the exhibit for what must be the hundredth time, closing his eyes and mouthing along to the narrator’s _“best friends since childhood…_ _”_ line, trying to force the memories to come back to him—golden hair, blue eyes, a crooked nose…

* * *

Steve goes to the Smithsonian more than he’d care to admit. It’s nice being stuck in a memory, even one as complicated as the war. There, he gets to see a Bucky that is still Bucky, that’s not a HYDRA weapon or on the run.

He thinks the hat disguise is gonna let up one of these days, but it’s usually busy and no one seems to notice him lingering in front of Bucky’s display longer than strictly necessary.

One day, however, while staring at the video of him and Bucky laughing as if it isn’t etched into his brain permanently, something catches his eye. Someone.

A baseball cap like his own, shoulder-length brown hair peeking out. A hoodie, sneakers- civilian clothing.

Steve slowly walks over to the corner of the room, where the man is stationed, reading a display about Joseph and Sarah Rogers on the wall. Before Steve can even get within a few feet of the figure, he turns around.

It _is_ Bucky.

Neither of them say anything, just stare at each other. 

After a minute, Bucky speaks up. “I don’t… I only remember a little. I only remember you.”

Steve wants to wrap Bucky in a hug, hold him in his arms and let the world around them melt away. But instead, he just replies, “Okay. You wanna talk about it?”

Bucky nods, then cocks his head to the door.

Steve follows him out the exit, and they walk silently to Steve’s apartment, hands in their pockets, hats tilted down.

When they get there, Steve sits down on the couch and expects Bucky to join him, but instead, his eyes dart around the room and his hand around his belt tightens.

“It’s okay, Buck. You’re safe.”

Bucky relaxes a little at that but doesn’t sit yet. He just exhales, and says, “Tell me about Bucky.”

* * *

Adjusting to being just _Bucky_ again after so many years of being a coldblooded assassin without a real identity is difficult, to say the least. 

In his first few weeks of living with Steve, Bucky often finds himself slipping back into The Winter Soldier, keeping a knife holstered and being on high alert at all times. He forgets to trust Steve at times, too, flinching whenever Steve reaches out to touch him and closely monitoring Steve whenever he’s near, surveying the situation to ensure he’s always prepared for a fight. In those moments, he tries to remind himself that he knows this man—it’s _Steve,_ the person he’d been unconsciously searching for all those years, the name that in its spot below the surface of his mind brought him so much comfort in his worst times. 

He keeps having frequent nightmares about HYDRA capturing and torturing him, forcing him to fight and kill when deep down he knows he doesn’t _want_ to. 

“Maybe you should try going to therapy,” Steve gently suggests the morning after a particularly frightening round of nightmares for Bucky. 

“Therapy?” He knows what therapy is, of course, but he’d never considered it for himself. 

“Sure. There’s no shame in getting some help when you need it, you know? I go to therapy whenever I can.”

Bucky nods, staring down at the cup of tea on the table in front of him as he ponders the suggestion. 

So he starts going to therapy. Healing is a slow and difficult journey, but he’s doing it. He goes to therapy and sits across from a kind-faced woman—he knew a man would just remind him of Pierce and all the other men with HYDRA who had hurt him—and allows himself to be the most vulnerable he thinks he’s ever been. 

Steve is so, so patient with him. He never shows an ounce of annoyance or frustration, not even on the bad days—the days he doesn’t trust Steve at all and sees him as a stranger wanting to hurt him, or the days he doesn’t want to drag himself out of bed. Steve is there throughout the entire journey, _'_ _ _til t_ he end of the line. _

* * *

It’s been a few months since Steve brought Bucky home. He gets better every day, further away from the weapon HYDRA turned him into.

Their day to day is peaceful, at least on the surface. Steve is on a bit of a break from being Captain America as the powers that be are still figuring out what to do about the collapse of SHIELD.

With the organization gone, there’s nothing really keeping Steve in DC. He’s gonna have to get back to his Avenging duties in New York sometime anyways. And he thinks Bucky might just be ready to head home to Brooklyn.

They’re sitting on the couch one night after finishing the first Star Wars movie (apparently one of the ‘essentials’ that they have to catch up on, that Steve wasn’t really impressed by but that Bucky loved) when Steve brings it up.

“When I got out of the ice, I don’t think I could’ve told you I was in New York. It looks really different,” he tells Bucky, who’s curled against the wall of the couch.

Bucky nods. “I guess I’m not surprised. Everything looks different.”

“Our building’s gone, and so is most of everything we knew,” Steve continues quietly.

“You’re still here,” Bucky replies.

Steve’s heart swells and he wants to cry. That had been the hardest part for him, waking up in 2011. Being without Bucky. Maybe that’s why he was so disheartened to see his city changed. But now it doesn’t matter. He and Bucky have each other. It’s all they need.

Bucky has been much better at remembering their lives before and during the war, but he’s made no indication that he remembers the full extent of their relationship. And Steve can be okay with that, he can. It’s a miracle to have Bucky back at all.

Still… he wants to hold him as they fall asleep together, he wants to kiss him like there’s no tomorrow, he wants to tell him how much he’s still in love with him, after all this time. 

But he’s not gonna push it. Maybe Bucky will remember, maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll fall in love with Steve again, anyway. 

After they’re all settled in New York, Steve gets the idea in his head to go to Coney Island. It’s one of the few things from their past that’s still standing, and it meant a lot to them back in the day. He remembers being fresh out of the ice, completely lost and isolated, and returning there. Maybe Bucky would like to do the same.

* * *

When Steve shyly asks him if he wants to go to Coney Island together, the puzzle pieces slowly click into place to form the full picture of his stolen memories. 

He remembers the two of them going there for Steve’s birthday one summer, eating hot dogs and watching the fireworks together. He remembers riding the ferris wheel together and managing to sneak a kiss at the top—risky as all hell, but worth it for the blush that painted Steve’s face the prettiest shade of pink. The vivid memory of the kiss is what stands out the most—Steve was more than just a lifelong friend, he was a lover, too. Despite not being able to remember as much of it as he would like to, Bucky is confident that they were together until the moment he fell off that freight train. He’s also confident that they’re soulmates: finding their way back to one another in a new century, a completely different world, proves that. 

He wants to show Steve that he knows that now, and he has the perfect plan to do so. 

* * *

Steve and Bucky go to Coney Island around Memorial Day when it opens for the summer season. Seeing the smile on his face, the ease of his expression, Steve is glad he brought Bucky back here.

They mostly just walk around in silence, with Steve noting some spot of nostalgic significance every once in a while. But then they get near the ferris wheel and Bucky says he wants to go on it, so they get in line.

Steve is standing next to Bucky awkwardly, unsure of what to do with his arms, or what to say when Bucky reaches out and grabs Steve’s hand. Steve can feel his face go bright red and his heart beat faster in his chest. Before he can scramble enough words together, they’re at the front of the line and being shuffled onto a bench. Bucky keeps hold of Steve’s hand, the touch sitting safely between them, something delicate and precious.

The ride jolts and they start to ascend into the summer New York air. 

Just as Steve is about to pipe up, Bucky says, “I remember.” He looks down at their hands then back up at Steve. “I remember Coney Island before, the times we came here and I wanted to kiss you, the times we came here and I actually got to.”

“Buck-”

“I don’t remember everything. Maybe I never will.” He squeezes Steve’s hand. “But I don’t need to, right? I have you now. Really, you never left me.”

Steve’s eyes are watering and he doesn’t have the words to begin to explain how he feels, so he just leans forward and places a soft kiss on Bucky’s lips. The world melts away for a second, and Steve melts into Bucky. But then he realizes that they’re not home and he jerks away before he remembers that yeah, they’re not home but they’re in a whole different time. One where they can kiss on the ferris wheel. One where they don’t have to hide.

“Forgot we could do this in public now,” Steve says with a blush.

Bucky just smiles, and Steve can see the sadness in it: all the years they missed, what they had to go through, both together and apart. But he sees the happiness in it also, when Bucky pulls him in again, the warmth of their lips joining the only thing that matters. Brooklyn may be different, the world may be different, they might be different themselves. But they’re together. Home. It’s the one place to be.

**Author's Note:**

> tysm for reading !!! i loved writing this with sav :) she wrote bucky's pov and i wrote steve's !!! pls go read her fics they're amazing. and !! come talk to me about stevebucky on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/daydreamsteve) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/daydreamsteve) <3  
> \- scorpiohs


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